Cloud based services such as Active Directory® by Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash. utilize a considerable number and variety of objects, of which, security principal accounts are one. Security principal accounts are objects that are assigned unique identifiers and are used in authentication and security mechanisms. A security principal account may be defined as a user account, group account, or computer account and may be assigned permissions to access certain network resources or other objects, and to perform certain actions on these objects.
There are times when a security principal representing a user may need to be reconnected to its cloud resources. This reconnection may be necessary due to a change of security principal's security domain or directory, an accidental deletion and recreation of the security principal, or comparable conditions. Some example scenarios may include forest consolidation, IT restructuring, corporate mergers or reorganizations, changes in employee status (e.g., contractor becoming full-time or the reverse), accidental deletion of the original security principal in a security group, etc.
Conventional systems tend to have a strict link between the security principal and the user's cloud resources. For the above-discussed example scenarios, the link would need to be manually reconnected to a new security principal, which may lead to a costly manual process, downtime for the user and may be prone to mistakes (reconnecting a user to the wrong resources in the cloud).